I heard from former Broadcom employees, that Hock thinks software companies are even more bloated than hardware companies. Some might say, a lot of software companies are bloated from a marketing standpoint, but if your strategy is to grow your customer base and capture market share, then you need strong marketing teams to do that, especially in highly competitive markets.
Hock only seems to care about customers that are willing to spend $10+ million, on his products, so I could see why marketing is useless to him. But he also loves to cut big in other areas like support, which is where I think he completely misunderstands the differences between software and hardware, and his same strategies for cost-cutting do more damage to the software product he has, vs hardware. Just read some of these comments from CA and Symantec customers about what Hock did to the software they have known and trusted for years:
Ethel Aardvark says
"I have no idea how a company with such poor systems AND technical support can still exist. I only use them because they bought my Symantec product, but never will again. I can't log in to the relevant support portal without the right access and to request access I need to log in to the relevant support portal. An endless cycle of the uselessness of which they are barely aware and totally careless. I will avoid these mo--ns like the plague from here on!"
David Doom says
"After days and days of working with support to try and resolve issues, I've come here to voice my opinion because nobody at Broadcom cares. Very Very bad/unprofessional company. Acquires products and then either discontinue or is no longer capable of supporting them. Nothing but apologies for their inability to help, unresponsive, terrible organization. Would not recommend them to anyone."
Wajhiuddin Khawajhi says
"I really had the worst experience getting technical support with Broadcom in my 20 years of the carrier in IT. I would NOT recommend any company to purchase any product or get any support from Broadcom. We used to have direct support with Symantec for 8 years and their technical support was fantastic. Unfortunately, our contract got transferred with Broadcom. And it's a nightmare to get in touch with them. No matter how severe the case is. I had a couple of cases open. The first case I had was no one event bothered to contact me for three/ four days. And after finally calling /chatting with them I finally receive a call from a technician who didn't very corporative at all. The second case I had was also very severe and it's been four days since no one has contacted me at all. I try to get someone on chat twice a day and they keep saying someone will call which they never did. I just called again and told them I need to talk to the manager and they said the same thing "manager will call you " So there is no point to get any kind of technical support from them it's not worth it at all"
Marko says
"They have tried to migrate us from Symantec. For three months we cannot get access to appropriate product replacement - Endpoint protection small business edition - cloud. I have repeatedly sent our screenshots where it could be seen that the product is not available in our portal but they answer that we have to be logged in (of course I have logged in, and it could be seen from the screenshot). Anyway, we are looking for product replacement from competitors. There must be some company willing to take our money."
Software is a completely different animal than hardware. Once you develop a chip, it can be used as long as it's performant and reliable. The user only thinks about the hardware when it's not working. But when it comes to software, there are a million other dynamics at play, security, configurations, and intractability, which require you to invest in good support to maintain the quality of experience with your product. Hock doesn't seem to get this, or at least he doesn't care. While margins on software are far better than hardware, you can't make drastics cuts to the staff that supports and improves that product the same way with hardware. It doesn't work, and Hock's recipe has proven a massive failure with his previous 2 software acquisitions.
If Apple was getting feedback from their iPhone customers, as bad as what I posted above, and the problems were related to Broadcom chips, Hock would get kicked to the curb in a Singaporean minute.
But Hock's strategy with software is the same he has applied to hardware, and all he does is royally ki-l the quality of products. VMware will be no different, except we have many more customers than Symantec and CA, and not only that, our software is more foundational to the stability of other software products. Hock acquiring Vmware is not only a bad thing for VMware employees. It's going to be bad for the world.